Tag Archives: twitter

After attempting to load one of my favorite social networks, Facebook, I was greeted by something I had been familiar with over the past month on another social network, Twitter. As many of you know, Twitter has been plagued with downtime issues due to bad design and infrastructure as of late. So, as Facebook makes serious design changes, it almost ends up looking and functioning like Twitter—the downtime really adds the finishing touches.

Regardless, you can find me on Twitter—James Mowery. I hope Twitter gets its act together, and I can only hope that Facebook doesn’t end up turning too much into Twitter. By then, people might actually get the idea that Twitter is actually useful and fun.

Twitter, my obsession for the past few weeks, has a bunch of great third-party tools being developed for it as we speak. Twhirl, TweetStats, and MyMileMarker are a few examples of amazing creative ingenuity. There is still much uncharted territory that has yet to be explored. One tool I think that would receive a ton of exposure is a sort of live activity/heat map.

Think about it: how cool would it be to see a map of the entire world, and right after a huge news story (e.g. another earthquake), you are able to see where activity on Twitter picks up, and perhaps even have the application analyze keywords to create invidiaul groupings for that heatmap. If “earthquake” is contained in the tweet, it will be available as another heatmap, and then you can see the activity of where “earthquake” tweets are involved. I simply think this would be a fun tool to watch.

I would love to develop a tool like this, and if I was a programmer, this is what I’d be spending my time working on. Perhaps, any of you programmers watching this right now should consider developing a tool like this for Twitter. It is bound to explode in popularity, and I would be interested in testing it.

Okay, so it is almost an understatement to say that Twitter has become my new obsession. It has simply changed my way of thinking when it comes to the social web. Twitter is a glimpse into the future, and while it isn’t perfect (information overload comes to mind), it is fascinating to be in touch with others.

My Twitter account has quickly grown, and I think I am going to end up having over 100 followers by the end of the month, but it is even more fascinating how I can get answers, ideas, and feedback in an instant from people. I just absolutely love knowing what my friends are up to at this very moment. Sure there are those people that can abuse Twitter, but beyond those few that abuse it, I just absolutely love it.

If you want to be my friend on Twitter, please feel free to follow me. If you seem like an interesting person, I will surely follow you back (especially if your a tech geek like me). I try to post links to interesting stories that relate to web 2.0, technology, and blogging. I might just turn out to be a valuable resource!

Oh, and I just wanted to appologize for not posting all that much recently. My new obsession has taken away from personal blogging time, but I think things have calmed down. I am back!